Passing by sandbags, visitors to the new exhibit at the Worcester Historical Museum soon realize they’re entering a disaster zone.

A killer tornado. A devastating hurricane. Floods, blizzards and ice storms. Deadly fires and explosions. A collapsing bridge and a jet plane crash.

Except for a biblical plague of locusts, visitors to "Worcester 911’’ can relive all the natural and manmade disasters that have struck the "City of Seven Hills’’ over the last 150 years but never defeated it.

While focusing on the historic 1953 tornado that ravaged the region, this informative show chronicles the cataclysmic events that have shaped Worcester history all the way to the Asian longhorn beetles that recently infested city’s trees.

Hanging on the wall, a statement by 36-year-old witness George Alexander attests to the tornado’s fury: "The whole house just disappeared and left it with not a piece of wood in the property.’’

"Worcester 911’’ also explores the human cost of natural and manmade disasters and shows how citizens and local businesses responded with courage and generosity when the chips were down.

Museum librarian Robyn Christensen conceived of the idea for the exhibit which was organized by Executive Director William Wallace and Exhibit Coordinator Vanessa Bumpus.

Visitors will see home movies, maps, artifacts and dramatic photographs which often captured the disasters as they occurred or recorded the immense damage they caused.

The single most powerful object on display is a 17-minute newsreel filmed by Worcester photographer Marvin Richmond that puts a recognizable human face on the tornado which caught the city by surprise and left death and destruction in its wake.

Bumpus said the idea for "Worcester 911’’ stemmed from public interest in the 60th anniversary of the mile-wide tornado that smashed the city and surrounding areas on June 9, 1953, killing 94 people as it roared 64 miles through Worcester County for 84 minutes with winds ranging from 200 to 260 mph.

The museum is offering free admission to police officers, firefighters, EMTs, first responders and DPW workers.

The exhibit tracks the tornado’s lethal progress starting at 4:20 p.m. when a fisherman at Quabbin Reservoir first witnessed the funnel cloud heading west toward Petersham.

Through a tableaux of clocks with fixed hands, visitors can follow its progress through Worcester where it smashed Assumption College at 5:12 p.m., killing two nuns and a priest, to two low-income housing projects which it hit at 5:16 p.m., causing $5 million damage.

After leaving Worcester, the tornado hit Shrewsbury at 5:18 p.m. and reached Westborough at 5:30 p.m., killing six people and injuring 75 before hitting Southborough a few minutes later where three more people were killed.

Some curious events occurred in the storm’s aftermath.

A photo of National Guardsmen who’d come to help out includes Worcester resident Harvey Ball, the graphic artist who’d go on to design the iconic smiley face button but only earned $45 from it because he never applied for a copyright.

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Making an unusual connection, the exhibit points out city officials replaced thousands of uprooted trees with Norway maples, which decades later happen to be one of the main menu items for the Asian longhorn beetles which are wreaking their own kind of havoc, causing the removal of 29,000 trees including 5,500 on city streets.

Despite their impact, several disasters have almost disappeared from our collective memories.

The death of six firefighters in the Worcester Cold Storage Fire of Dec. 3, 1999, remains a painful memory, but who remembers monster hurricane called "the Long Island Express’’ of Sept. 21, 1938, which killed more than 261 people across New England?

An overheated sewing machine started the Merrifield Fire in an industrial complex at the present day site of the DCU Center on June 14, 1854, injuring 35 people and destroying 58 businesses. One of the strangest disasters was the death of Mayor James Blake on Dec. 16, 1870, who suffered fatal burns while inspecting repairs at a gas works accompanied by a worker carelessly carrying a lantern at a time a valve had been left open.

For all the city’s varied disasters, Bumpus said the one constant has been "Worcester residents always rallied’’ when things got tough.